Refashioning: Making Clothing More Functional - Two Okay Dresses into One Great One

Okay, so at first glance, you might wonder what is wrong with these two dresses. They are both perfect Type 4s and seem to be exactly my style. Well, honestly, this is just a personal preference thing to me. This is what I find wrong with them: The dress on the left is just boring to me. I have a couple other hounds tooth dresses that I end up wearing when I am in the hounds tooth mood, so this one always gets neglected. The dress on the right is actually a weird tunic thing and while it looks great in the picture right here, scroll down one.

See??? Who designed this? The pleats billow out right at the boobs, making the wearer have absolutely NO SHAPE!

I am actually a fan of a good Korean hanbok, which also cut off at the boobs, but this dress is trying to attempt the same thing but with slinky fabric, so the result is an epic fail. However, I LOVE the red polka dots, so let the harvesting begin!

So, if you remember my blog post about turning dresses into skirts, you will remember that the placement of your zipper is very important before you start cutting. In this case, I was harvesting the top of the hounds tooth dress, so I made sure that the zipper was zipped all the way up.

Also really important: I cut below the bodice and left about 1/2 an inch of the skirt part. This is to allow for seam allowance.

To free the polka dots, I cut the skirt off the. . .can I even call it a bodice? Anyways, you will notice the skirt part has those pleats and if I had cut into the skirt, I would have had to re-pleat them, so I cut into the "bodice" part up 1/2 an inch to allow for seam allowance and also to save having to re-pleat the skirt.

See the line of black at the top? That's the seam allowance I'm talking about.

Then, I pinned the first bodice to the second skirt.

I used my quilt seam allowance measurement thingie (I don't know technical terms sometimes. . .It's that metal arm thing next to the outside of the fabric) to keep a steady measurement of an inch seam allowance.

The finished dress.

Okay, so the belly is still a little pouchy, but at least the skirt starts well under the chest, so you can see that the wearer has a shape! I will definitely wear this dress more often! 

                           It may not be your cup of tea, but hopefully you got an idea from it!

                                                                             The End!